Blockälteste (Barrack Chief)
At Birkenau-Auschwitz, '''the '''Blockältestes, the barrack chiefs, had power of life and death over us. As in camp E of Birkenau''nobody worked but waited for days, weeks and months on end to be selected either for the crematorium or some labor camp in Germany, twenty-four out of twenty-four hours we were at the beck and call of the barrack chief. There were about one thousand ''Häftlings in a barrack. The chief of the barrack, the Blockältestes, was helped by tow''Vertreters, ''the deputy barrack chiefs. In summer 1944 the Blockältestes, of the thirty barracks in camp E were replaced four times. In the beginning they were all gypsies. Then they were replaced with deportees from Hungary and then the latter with Polish Häftlings. The last ones were recruited from among the German common law breakers. They were sadistically with no exception. One of them, however, distinguished himself through unequalled beastliness: the chief of barracks No 21, whom the over one thousand teen-agers who were detained in that block nicknamed "the Lamp Post". He was almost two meters high, had brushy eyebrows and wrinkled cheeks, high cheek bones and long and heavy hands. He had his own method. When he slapped someone's face he somehow put his hand under his jaw and lifted a little the poor miserable throwing him out of balance and knocking him to the ground. Hardly there was a Häftling whom he did not knock to the ground at first blow. I always saw him carrying a long curbed cudgel he used to hit the detainees with, breaking their bones or their heads or even causing their death. The two Vertreters'' had equally long and heavy cudgels, which were also curbed. Only the ''SS-men had the right to carry riding whips. The Blockältestes used to strike with cudgels. At Landsberg, ''the barracks were dug into the earth, just like some graves. Fifty ''Häftlings'' lived in one barrack. The barrack chiefs there had no right to thrash us, as our labor force was needed. But they hastened our death by constantly stealing from miserably small food rations. My barrack chief was a doctor called Winkler. In spring 1945 bread that had been allotted to 3 men in autumn was the daily ration of food for 16. Wintkeler used to cut a big slice for himself from the middle of each loaf and gave the two halves to be shared among sixteen people. He also stole from what little margarine we were given. At night, back from out work of slaves utterly exhausted, we received our food at the barrack entrance. Most of us usually finished to eat their ration by the time they got to their "dibs", where they fell like logs on the rags covering the straws and instantly fell a sleep. When silence fell over the barrack ''Blockältestes ''Winkler, a doctor, began to swallow down. He had an enormous, disproportionate head and large jaws and he champed so loud by that I had the impression that a whole heard of cattle was ruminating. Those who could not sleep were tossing indignantly about not so much because he stole our food, he robbed us of our life but because the ''SS-men managed to attain little by little their purpose: to degrade us and hasten our decay from the condition of human beings. Winkler and almost all'' Blockältestes ''and ''Kapos ''and ''Lagerältestes ''were people who had sunk to the lowest level of human degradation and we feared we dreaded we were following in their footsteps.